Hi everyone, joining in the conversation here since I’ve been away for the last few meetings. I am traveling at the time of next week’s Monday meeting but can try to join on my phone, or at least update my thoughts.
I had setup two versions, one with Hugo and one with Jekyll. That said, @RaduNichita 's website at Hello from The Beman Project | The Beman Project looks really good, and probably better than what I might’ve managed with Hugo.
My two cents on the evaluation criteria.
I agree that web framework updates can be allowed to be more difficult. In my experience hosting my own static website for the last 11 years or so, after you’ve got the features down it’s not very common to make fundamental changes since the tech itself is not that unstable overall. Adding to the above, this is also why the theme’s/plugin’s own updates / maintenance isn’t that critical in my experience.
Now this brings us to the topic of longevity. Especially in the situation where some builds break due to dependencies’ compatibility breaking due to lack of maintenance. This can definitely happen, but what I’ve done in the past for my website (it uses haskell and a really unmaintained static site generator), is to setup a docker build image with all the right versions. My job is setup on GitLab (although GitHub would be better), and it basically pulls a docker image to build it. Link here (don’t worry, that “ENCRYPTION_LABEL” is not a sensitive secret 
)
I think in the first go it is fine to go with the simplest possible deployment, but to avoid having to spend time in the future dealing with dependency issues, I would recommend making a docker image (and uploading it to DockerHub) in the medium term so we never lose the ability to build the website, irrespective of the framework.